“The man certainly has artistic vision, great enthusiasm, intelligence, and is great fun to watch.” – Fun to watch (fail), yes. The rest… not so much. Cool shades though. Can’t forget the cool shades. PB was WAY ahead of his time rocking those. A true visionary (get it?).

“These qualities might not be matched by an ability to actually turn all that artistic vision into reality” – Not a big deal at all, unless your job is to turn artistic ‘vision’ into reality. Oh right…

“Already it can’t possibly get worse than Lord of Ultima” – I’ll take that bet. Granted, I’ve never played LoU, but as far as I know, BP was not involved with LoU, so if nothing else it has that going for it.

“I’d rather see Paul Barnett trying to revive the Ultima brand than Richard Garriott” – Paul Barnett, bears man vs RG, Ultima series creator, including UO, and Tabula Rasa, which EA did a nice job of burying before its potential was reached. Hell, I’d take RG coding My Little Ponies from a space shuttle over PB being a QA intern with the next Skyrim game (not the MMO abomination).

“most people would consider the original Ultima IV as well as Ultima Online to be unplayable these days” – Lets ignore that UO has more people still playing it today than many ‘modern’ MMOs, and that’s not counting the 3rd party shards going, some of which have thousands of players. Or that EA killed a Ultima IV fan remake project in fear that it would distract people from PG upcoming abortion.

14 Responses to It’s not contagious, is it?

Thanks for the link to the EA Louse post. I have it all still in my RSS reader… including the glorious comment thread… so much hate from SWTOR fans… but was looking for a place I could link to as a source for an upcoming post.

As for RG vs. PB… well… they both certainly seems to believe their own press more than is good for them and neither seem to be at all self-conscious about acting like a loon in public.

But RG has a track record of great games that have earned him enough money to build crazy adolescent fantasy mansions and to pay for spaceship rides.

PB, who is less than 10 years younger than RG, has what to his credit now? WAR and…?

RG’s problem has been that he had great success in his youth in a new medium and has been looking to recreate that from scratch again. Like many artists who have experienced that, he went on to reject (mildly) his early works to push on into new things, often leaving fans behind.

The question is, will his “Ultimate RPG” be more of trying to find new things, or a collection of things he has learned as he has matured? Can he embrace the old and the new and create something that his fans both recognize and yet find new experience in?

As for what PB and EA are doing. That sounds more like “milk the cow” than “re-imagine a classic” or “bring something new to the table.”

If that is what makes some people happy… well, I suppose they might be EA stockholders or something.

I havent read the louse post until now. What great fun the comments are. As for tobold, I cant read it. I want to punch him. Its beyond me how someone can value the opinion of a generation of gamers who made angry birds a success and give a damn if they think something is unplayable.

Piracy? You’re joking right? You must be. Piracy is higher than ever, sure — so are sales. No significant effect of one on the other — in fact, the only possible conclusion to make from the facts is that when piracy increases, sales increase, and vice versa.

Let’s not mince words indeed! Nobody has ever been able to legitimately link piracy to a lack of commercial success. Gaming execs who fret about this sort of thing pull numbers out of their asses, multiply that number by their suggested retail price, then throw the resulting dollar amount around like it was a hit directly to their bottom line. Boohoo, woe is me, look at all that money we LOST!

The problem is, they have never been able to prove that anybody who pirated their game would have become a customer if piracy had not been an option. It is only a lost sale if somebody was going to buy it in the first place.

Nor do they ever talk about the conversion rate for those who pirate as a “try before you buy” option.

Hell, those same execs can’t even prove that games with no DRM (i.e. those that are easy to pirate) suffer from piracy more than games which have expensive and draconian DRM schemes ala Spore.

So you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly take the piracy issue seriously when a company throws money after DRM schemes where the only demonstrable result is annoying legitimate, paying customers. They have already demonstrated that their knowledge on the subject amounts to bullshit and wishful thinking.

Frankly this post looks much more a troll to me that what Tobold posted. On the other hand… hmm… I guess trolling the interwebz is at least your part-time job.

And in case you take your own post in some way seriously, here are a couple of “facts”:
– Whatever happened to WAR is certainly not Paul’s fault individually. I’m also reasonably sure that in grand scheme of things there are people who are way, WAY more to blame for WAR problems that Paul.
– Some people learn from their mistakes. Do you have proof that Paul is not one of them?

So yeah. I’m not Paul’s fan either. However accusing Tobold of trolling simply because he doesn’t think Paul is total write-off or because he thinks that RG has made an even bigger joke of himself lately — that looks stilly to me.

Oh yeah, and I’ve played TR. So don’t tell me how “great” it was or what kind of “potential” it had. It was a pretty little shooter with nice moments when you tried to defend a point vs. invading aliens (whatever they were). It was incredibly shallow though (in my opinion).